LONG BEACH GROWS™ (www.longbeachgrows.org) is Long Beach's original urban agriculture resource hub for >4 years, since 2010.
LONG BEACH GROWS' mission is to promote green, healthy, environmentally sustainable urban agriculture in Long Beach, California, & other activities that educate, enhance, & grow our communities by ensuring & safeguarding local food security.
Our vision is a city that feeds itself.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Jamie Oliver’s food revolution victory with Los Angeles Unified School District sets a national example

From Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution is transforming the food security scene in Los Angeles and by extension the rest of the nation and the world.

Tuesday June 14, 2011, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board voted in favor of eliminating flavored milk from the city’s public schools. This school food policy goes into effect July 1 to improve the nutrition of the 680,000 students in the second largest school district in the nation. LA students will be drinking real unflavored milk with their meals from now on.

This change is in response to Jamie’s Food Revolution efforts that currently have LA in the spotlight and his Milk Day of Action campaign that inspired food revolutionaries across the nation to demand only fresh wholesome food for schools, starting with real milk.

In Jamie Oliver’s TED award speech given February 2010 in Long Beach, California, Jamie highlighted flavored milks in schools as an issue “epitomizing the trouble that we’re in." He said,

“School food is something that most kids, 31 million a day actually, have twice a day, more than often, breakfast and lunch, 190 days of the year, so you could say that school food is quite important,really, judging the circumstances."

After dumping a wheelbarrow of sugar, the amount consumed by a single child during 5 years of elementary school, just from milk, Jamie said,

“Judging the circumstances, any judge in the whole world would look at the statistics and the evidence and they would find any government involved guilty of child abuse, that’s my belief.”

In response to his recent LAUSD victory, Jamie said,

“With flavored milk, kids are getting loads of sugar and other food additives they simply don’t need to grow and learn. In the Food Revolution the little battles set us up for the next win. All these little battles count; they matter. It’s not just milk. It’s caring about what we feed kids 180 days a year.”

Perhaps your school district did not get on the Milk Day bandwagon this year. That’s OK. You can use your summer away from school to organize your school food policy campaign. It’s never too late to make our schools accountable for the good or bad food choices they offer our children.